DEL STONE JR.: There's no eating like Southern eating

Sunday

Sep 17, 2017 at 8:00 AM

DEL STONE JR. @DelSnwfdn

Long ago, in an abandoned iteration of my life that would have had me teaching school students, I stood in a classroom at Max Bruner Junior High School with a question hanging before me. Where was I from? The kids could not identify my accent.

“I don’t have an accent,” I told them. “I’m speaking the language the way it was intended to be spoken.”

Despite having lived in the South before the day when the last veteran of the War of Northern Aggression had passed, I had not picked up that honey-dripped, rolled-in-cracker-crumbs drawl peculiar to longtime Northwest Florida and southern Alabama residents.

But that isn’t to say I was immune to the South. The cooking, for instance, is an adopted weakness. I can’t imagine eating the way Yankees eat.

I like my cornbread crumbly and savory. The northerners who moved here brought a plague of sugar with them, and that infection has found its way into our Southern-style cornbread. No, no, a thousand ways and times, no. Cornbread is not meant to be sweet. It’s meant to be bright yellow, sopping with butter and maybe decorated with bits of cracklin’, your choice.

Same goes for grits. Northerners don’t get the concept of grits. They think of grits the way they think of a hot breakfast cereal, like cream of wheat. Heresy. You pour a spreading pool of grits onto your plate – it’s OK if they run into your spicy sausage or eggs – and top them with a slab of butter and lots of salt and pepper (the more pepper the better). If you want to be all fancy you can eat them with a fork but they’re best when scooped up on a buttery slice of toasted white bread.

Ever suck on a chunk of sugar cane? Once, you found them at roadside stands over in Mississippi and Louisiana. You cut off a hunk, put it in your mouth and suck on it for the next hour. The sweetness will knock you down. You don’t want to overdo it because that stuff will rot your teeth, but for a once-in-awhile treat you can’t beat it. Also, try syrup made from sugar cane. It looks evil, a dark brew in a large glass bottle that might once have held moonshine, but mmmm, it’s a unique Southern treat.

Speaking of roadside stands, stop at one and pick up a dripping bag of boiled peanuts. Most people think of peanuts as salty nuggets of goodness, but in fact they taste a whole lot better if they’ve been boiled and bagged in brine. The consistency is what you might call “gooshy,” but so what? That makes them even more interesting.

As are our raw oysters. Folks not from around here stare in horror at a platter of 12 shucked oysters nestled in a bed of ice, with lemon, hot sauce and a cold bottle of beer off to the side. But you’ll just have to get over your aversion to putting something slimy-looking and possibly still alive in your mouth. There are still some oyster joints in these parts and it’s important you undergo your baptism by slime at one of them, as the ambiance of waterfront, neon beer signs on the walls between stuffed fish, and possibly some twangy song about pickups and heartbreak on a jukebox will forever alter your brain to favor the delicacy.

About those fish: When people start talking about sautéing their fish, or adding them to some kind of soup, I feel the blood vessels in my forehead start to pulse. Everyone knows (or should) the only proper way to cook fish is take a fillet, dip it in a bowl of milk, dredge it in flour, then drop it in a skillet containing hot oil. That snapping sound you hear is the sound of angels smacking their lips, because once you finish cooking and draining it, you cut off a piece and oh my. It’s a fork full of heaven.

Southern hospitality? Only if you eat like we do!

Contact online editor Del Stone Jr. at (850) 315-4433 or dstone@nwfdailynews.com. Follow him on twitter at @delsnwfdn, and friend him on Facebook at dels nwfdn.